Redstate Has Gone Drupal
We made the decision to move to Drupal a while ago. It was clearly coming along as a robust platform, that met all of our needs. Why did we move from Scoop? Well my issues have long been documented, but mostly they revolve around the fact that the Scoop developer community is extremely small, relatively closed, and overwhelmingly liberal.Redstate.com is one of the more influential sites that represents the followers of the American Republican party (many of them deny this, but these types deny a lot of thing). Word of warning to redstate.com about dealing with the drupal community -- you're probably going to want to keep your political leanings like you keep your shirts: "tucked in".Drupal is not merely an overwhelmingly artsy-fartsy and left-wing, "liberal, liberal, liberal" (in the words of Rush) community. Its much worse: it has Europeans. Some of which are even French.Redstate's political shortcomings aside, sounds like they did a great job in putting the site together.
For the Drupal geeks: It's Drupal 4.7.3 with some serious modifications in Views and CCK. The Drupal code base is untouched, but we have a custom Redstate module with some assorted functions.
And, at the very least, the redstaters are not idiots like some of the people who "strategize" for Democrats. On numerous occassions, I've tried to talk up drupal to Democract consultants, but they'd always say the same thing: "we're going with scoop!". I'd ask them why. I'd try to pick apart their argument. But they'd bark, "Kaus uses coop!" This apparently is an alpha and omega answer. Open and shut case, Johnson.Well gee. You can't argue with that. I asked them whether they truly believed the Daily Kaus's success was a result of the technology they used. They'd reply, "A good deal of it, yes."Thats when I knew they were idiots. Their argument (if that's what you call it...) is about as naive as it gets. They probably still think websites are magic tricks.
Technology is never a solution; technology is always a problem. But, technology is sometimes a problem which helps solve even bigger problems. Thus, you should seek to pick the technology which contributes least to magnifying the sum of your problems. The choice that redstate.com made was the correct choice. The choice of Democratic consults was the fools choice. Especially considering none of them have Kaus's resources.Not that the lot of Democratic consultants acting like idiots suprises me. Lord knows they'll probably f#ck up this congressional election too. Most of them probably still support Lieberman!
At the very least, now that a republican stronghold has moved to drupal, we can probably expect some progressive "thinktank" to begin studying their move to drupal. Democrats love to discuss, to analyize, and to study. Not that you'll find much evidence of it in their actions....
Note:
On a scale of 1 to 10, I score 9's on both leftwing, and anarchist. Don't mistake me for a conservative. (it wouldn't be the first time...)